In computer systems, there are two widely applied ways to locate/identify resources: flat names and hierarchical names. The flat name is consisted of a fixed or variable length of string to uniquely represent a resource. Exact matching is used to look up a resource. One example of flat names is the 48-bit Ethernet media access control (MAC) address described in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.3, which is incorporated herein by reference as if reproduced in its entirety. Systems incorporating flat names do not scale well because they can grow only so large before all available names are used up. A hierarchical name is divided into different areas, which can be thought of as subnames. Systems incorporating a hierarchical name structure are said to comprise a hierarchical name space. The hierarchical name space may be thought of as a tree with each subname representing a branch of a tree from a root name. Thus, each area is its own subname space within an overall name space. Therefore, each object must have a unique name only within its subname space in order to have an unambiguously resolvable name within the name space hierarchy. Thus, in contrast to flat name spaces, systems incorporating hierarchical names can scale to extremely large networks.